Contested Legacy of the Past: Brendan McFarlane and Margaret Thatcher
LIAM TUNNEY, Belfast Telegraph, February 24th, 2025
SHAME ON YOU, SAYS FAMILY OF GUARD KILLED BY THE IRA IN 1984
Mary Lou McDonald has come under fire for a tribute posted following the death of former IRA prisoner and Maze escapee Brendan 'Bik' McFarlane.
Mr McFarlane died on Friday following a short illness.
He was sentenced to life in prison in 1976 for his role in an attack on the Bayardo Bar on Aberdeen Street in the Shankill Road area which killed five people — including a 17-year-old girl — and injured more than 60 the previous year.
The attack is believed to have been in response to the Miami Showband massacre carried out by the UVF two weeks earlier.
Mr McFarlane was also charged with the 1983 kidnapping of supermarket executive Don Tidey in the Republic.
Garda recruit Garry Sheehan (23) and Irish army private Patrick Kelly (36) were killed during the operation to rescue Mr Tidey.
After a number of legal challenges, a trial against Mr McFarlane eventually proceeded in 2008.
However, it collapsed when Garda evidence was ruled inadmissible.
‘A life that will inspire generations to come’
Ms McDonald was among senior Sinn Féin figures who paid tribute to the father-of-three, describing him as “an important influence on the development of the peace process”.
“Bik McFarlane lived his life in pursuit of freedom, peace and equality. It was a life well lived, a life that shaped a legacy that will inspire generations to come,” she added.
“Today, we have lost a great patriot who lived his life for the freedom and unity of Ireland.
“His life was about activism, about the uplift of working people, about the nationhood of Ireland.”
Ms McDonald came under fire in the Republic from Austin Stack, whose prison officer father Brian Stack was shot in the neck by the IRA in 1984 and died 18 months later.
‘Not a saint’
He wrote on X that McFarlane had “murdered recruit Garda Gary Sheehan and Private Paddy Kelly. Shame shame shame on you!”
In Northern Ireland, Ulster Unionist MLA Doug Beattie raised concerns that the victims of the Bayardo Bar attack were being forgotten at the expense of those who carried out the killings.
Listing the victims — civilians Linda Boyle, Joanne McDowell, William Gracey, Samuel Gunning, and UVF member Hugh Harris — Mr Beattie said the victims had been reduced to “just a number”.
“Again we eulogise the terrorist murderer while their victims are just a number,” he said.
“We have a society that remembers the perpetrators in word and memorial more than they remember the victims. I won't apologise for remembering victims in words.”
Máiria Cahill, a former Irish senator who was abused by an IRA man, also quoted Ms McDonald's tribute on her X account, saying: “There will be a time when this statement will come back to haunt Sinn Féin.” “There is always a danger when Irish republicans die that they become saints posthumously, mostly because people either do not know them or need to use them,” she added.
“I knew Bik McFarlane, who has died, well.
“He was not a saint, and so I won't pretend he was.”
Bayardo Bar
On Saturday, victims' group South East Fermanagh Foundation paid tribute to those who died in the Bayardo attack, as well as the two men killed in the operation to rescue Don Tidey.
“Tonight our thoughts are with the families of The Bayardo pub bombing on the Shankill, the families of Pte Patrick Kelly and Garda Recruit Garry Sheehan and so many other innocents of hate filled terrorism,” they said.
“These bereaved survivors are heroes and martyrs, not those who murder their fellow neighbours.”
Meanwhile, funeral details have been announced for Mr McFarlane.
The notice — posted by PJ Brown's Funeral Directors — said he “passed away peacefully in hospital surrounded by his loving family after bravely fighting one of his bravest battles”.
His funeral will be held following a service and blessing outside his family home tomorrow at 12pm.
Burial in Milltown Cemetery will follow at 2pm.
McDonald tribute to late IRA figure ‘nauseating’ – Flanagan
Cormac McQuinn, Political Correspondent, Irish Times, February 24th, 2025
Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald’s tribute to former senior Provisional IRA member Brendan “Bik” McFarlane has been described as “nauseating” by former minister for justice Charlie Flanagan.
McFarlane (74), who was the IRA commander in the Maze prison during the 1981 hunger strikes, died last week following a short illness.
Ms McDonald said she learned of his death with great sadness, describing him as “a giant of Irish republicanism” who was “an important influence on the development of the peace process”.
She added that his life was about “activism”, the “uplift of working people” and “the nationhood of Ireland”.
Ms McDonald also said “we have lost a great patriot who lived his life for the freedom and unity of Ireland”.
‘Vicious sectarian crimes’
Mr Flanagan, a former Fine Gael TD, criticised the tribute, saying McFarlane was “directly and heavily involved in vicious sectarian crimes”.
He said: “Heaping praise on such a controversial figure demonstrates the distance between Sinn Féin and the acceptance of the rule of law.”
Sinn Féin declined to offer a comment in response to Mr Flanagan’s remarks.
Maze escape
McFarlane was imprisoned at the Maze for his part in a 1975 IRA attack at a pub in the Protestant Shankill Road area of Belfast in which five people were killed.
He and two others carried out a bomb and gun attack on the pub they suspected of being used by UVF members.
Two people were shot dead outside the pub while three more died in the subsequent explosion, which injured dozens of people.
McFarlane was among 38 IRA inmates who escaped the Maze in Co Antrim in September 1983.
He would later be named by gardaí as suspected of participating in the November 1983 kidnapping of businessman Don Tidey.
Mr Tidey was snatched outside his south Dublin home and held captive for more than three weeks in a wooded hideaway while ransom demands were issued.
A trainee garda, Gary Sheehan (23), from Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan, and Patrick Kelly (35), an Army private, were shot dead during Mr Tidey’s rescue that December near Ballinamore, Co Leitrim.
McFarlane was arrested in Amsterdam in 1986, extradited to Northern Ireland and released on parole from the Maze in 1997.
Legal battle
Gardaí decided not to pursue the case against McFarlane over the Tidey kidnapping while he was still in jail in the North.
He was arrested in Co Louth in January 1998. A decade-long legal battle followed.
McFarlane was cleared in Dublin’s Special Criminal Court in 2008 of false imprisonment and firearms possession in relation to the kidnapping of Mr Tidey.
In September 2010, the European Court of Human Rights ruled he was entitled to monetary relief from the State for the delays in bringing him to trial.
The day Thatcher used SAS to send a message to IRA leadership
Irish News, February 24th, 2025
In his new book The Sorrow and the Loss –The Tragic Shadow Cast by the Troubles on the Lives of Women, veteran journalist Martin Dillon highlights the impact of the Troubles on women, including IRA member Mairead Farrell. Here he provides an account of how former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher oversaw an SAS ambush that claimed Farrell’s life along with those of two other republicans in Gibraltar in 1988
EARLY on that March morning, Thatcher was going through her customary routine in 10 Downing Street, laying out the Sunday newspapers on her desk. She liked browsing the tabloids first, especially The Sun, which was read by her most loyal followers.
Its front-page headline was ‘Easter Coach Outcry’.
Apparently, clubs, coach companies and pubs were concerned about some new Department of Transport regulations limiting coach travel.
The Observer had a big feature on the death of Fleet Street.
The author of the article told a wonderful story about media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who entered a room in his Sun newspaper premises to find its executives drinking from large brandy glasses.
An indignant Murdoch later remarked that they were drinking his Scotch from ‘goldfish bowls’.
Thatcher’s husband, who loved a tipple, would have enjoyed the story. Her eyes may also have settled on a Times article warning that inflation had risen to 18.4%; a revelation that threatened her premiership.
Later that morning, military and intelligence figures arrived at No. 10 to brief Thatcher in an upstairs room known as GEN42. No one knew how it acquired its name, just that it was where secrets about Northern Ireland were discussed.
Direct line to SAS
A direct line to Whitehall and a satellite link to Special Air Service (SAS) HQ in Hereford kept everyone aware in real time about events in Gibraltar, with minute-by-minute reports on the surveillance of the IRA trio. The British military operation had been given the name ‘Operation Flavius’.
Thatcher’s ‘boys’, as she liked to refer to soldiers of the SAS, were in Gibraltar to eliminate targets, not to arrest them. This was to be a repeat of the killings she ordered after Airey Neave’s murder.
We do not know what Mairéad Farrell’s plan was once Savage proved he could park his car beside the governor’s residence and leave it there for several hours without arousing suspicion.
Would she have gone back to Torremolinos and returned to the Rock the following Sunday with the other car containing the powerful Semtex explosives or would the two IRA operatives in Torremolinos have been tasked with delivering the bomb to the Rock? But on that Sunday, after Savage parked the rental car and walked away from it, the trio began strolling casually along Winston Churchill Avenue with McCann and Farrell some distance from Savage.
Perhaps, they planned to go for lunch or visit the underground caves, but whatever their plan, it did not come to fruition because this was the moment three armed SAS soldiers sprang into action. Farrell spotted two of them leaping over a fence near a petrol station and running towards her and McCann.
Raised hands
She instinctively raised her hands in the air and so too did McCann.
He even tried to shield her with his body, realising that these armed strangers were professionals and meant business.
I wonder whether Mairéad Farrell expected to be arrested as she raised her hands, as had happened outside the Conway Hotel. It was not to be.
This time, she was shot three times in the face and neck from three feet or less away. While she was lying on the ground, she was shot a few times in her back.
McCann was shot twice in the chest and head and three times in the back as he fell. Both were then shot again at very close range.
Savage saw the shooting and took off running with another SAS soldier in pursuit.
He shot Savage in the back, bringing him to the ground, and then shot him eighteen times at close range. It was overkill; a pathologist later wrote that Savage was ‘riddled’.
The killing of the three was observed by reliable witnesses. While the SAS shooters claimed that the trio looked like they were reaching for weapons, the evidence of the witnesses proved this to be a lie.
It was a triple execution.
British papers were quick to offer false narratives provided by British intelligence disinformation specialists, who had already prepared the groundwork for what they would tell the media.
Bogus stories were fed to the tabloids about a bomb in Gibraltar in a car parked by Savage and that the trio had the capability to detonate it remotely, which led to the SAS being forced to take them out.
However, it seems clear to me that Farrell and her companions were allowed to enter Gibraltar without a bomb that morning so they could be liquidated. This was Thatcher’s revenge. She was sending a personal message to the IRA leadership.
The Sorrow and the Loss – The Tragic Shadow Cast by the Troubles on the Lives of Women by Martin Dillon and published by Merrion Press is available now.
Comment
It's as if people are "afraid to go there" of "reopening old wounds".. But there can be no closure, no reconciliation without an honest engagement with our multiple and, often, diverging, truths.
Mike Jennings
Mary Lou made six mentions of his life and living in a tribute to a man who took many lives.
Geoffrey Dudgeon
